
Leo M J de SonnevilleLeiden University | LEI · Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
Leo M J de Sonneville
PhD
About
175
Publications
47,741
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
May 2005 - June 2020
Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University
Position
- Professor (Associate)
April 1986 - September 1996
March 1979 - October 1981
Education
August 1983 - February 1988
September 1973 - November 1981
September 1964 - November 1972
Publications
Publications (175)
Adults with Intellectual Disability who show severe challenging behaviour need intensive individual support. If intensive support proves to be insufficient, extra intensive support can be provided in the Netherlands, which is characterized by more time for individual care. The present study evaluates the impact of extra intensive support over time....
This study intended to explore the neuropsychological ramifications in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) survivors in Malaysia and to examine treatment-related sequelae. A case-control study was conducted over a 2-year period. Seventy-one survivors of childhood ALL who had completed treatment for a minimum of 1 year and were in remission...
The 5-year survival rate of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in Malaysia is between 80% and 90%. This study intended to explore the neuropsychological ramifications in childhood ALL survivors in Malaysia and to examine treatment-related sequelae. A case-control study was conducted over a 2-year period. Seventy-one survivors of childhoo...
Impairments in cognitive processes and their associations with dimensional measures of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity and anxiety were examined in children at risk of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Children referred by teachers for exhibiting ADHD-type problems (n = 116; 43 meeting full diagnostic criteria for ADHD; 4-8 years) co...
Many students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) attending higher education drop out prematurely. The predictive value of self-reported daily executive functioning (EF) and (cognitive) performance-based EF (mental flexibility and working memory) for academic progress was evaluated in 54 young adults with ASD (Mage = 22.5, SD = 2.4, 72% male). Re...
Background:
Several studies have reported improved cognitive outcomes after kidney transplantation, but most studies either did not include controls or lacked extensive neuroimaging. In addition, there is uncertainty whether kidney donation is a safe procedure in terms of cognitive outcomes.
Methods:
We prospectively studied neurocognitive funct...
Objectives
To explore possible working mechanisms of anxiety reduction in women with anxiety disorders, treated with art therapy (AT).
Methods
A RCT comparing AT versus waiting list (WL) condition on aspects of self-regulation. Stress regulation (heart rate and heart rate variability) and executive functioning (daily behavioural and cognitive perf...
Objectives
Art therapy (AT) as a treatment option for anxiety is regularly employed in clinical practice, but scientific evidence for its effectiveness is lacking, since this intervention has hardly been studied. The aim was to study the effectiveness of AT on anxiety in adult women. The specific type of AT studied was anthroposophic AT.
Methods
A...
Background
Anxiety disorders are one of the most diagnosed mental health disorders. Common treatment consists of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy. In clinical practice, also art therapy is additionally provided to patients with anxiety (disorders), among others because treatment as usual is not sufficiently effective for a large gro...
Background characteristics of the included studies.
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Full list of search terms and databases.
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Data extraction form.
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Excluded studies with reasons for exclusion.
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Objective:
Emotion recognition is an important aspect of emotion processing, which is needed for appropriate social behavior and normal socialization. Previous studies in adults with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, in those convicted of criminal behavior, or in children with conduct disorder show impairments in negative emotion rec...
Objective: Emotion recognition is an important aspect of emotion processing, which is needed for appropriate social behavior and normal socialization. Previous studies in adults with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, in those convicted of criminal behavior, or in children with conduct disorder show impairments in negative emotion reco...
Objective: This study aimed to evaluate neuropsychological consequences in survivors of childhood brain tumor.
Method: A case-control study was conducted over a period of 4 months in a tertiary referral center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Fourteen survivors of childhood brain tumor aged 7–18 years, who were off-treatment for at least 1 year and were...
XXY (KS) occurs in 1:650 male births, though less than 25% are ever identified. We assessed stability of neurocognitive features across diverse populations and quantified factors mediating outcome. Forty-four boys from the Netherlands (NL) and 54 boys from the United States (US) participated. The Wechsler Intelligence Scales assessed intellectual f...
About 1 in 650 boys are born with an extra X chromosome (47,XXY or Klinefelter Syndrome). 47,XXY is associated with vulnerabilities in socio-emotional development. This study was designed to assess types of cognitive deficits in individuals with 47,XXY that may contribute to social-emotional dysfunction, and to evaluate the nature of such deficits...
This study examined the influence of younger siblings on children’s understanding of second-order false belief. In a representative community sample of firstborn children (N = 229) with a mean age of 7 years (SD = 4.58), false belief was assessed during a home visit using an adaptation of a well-established second-order false belief narrative enact...
Cognitive and mental health problems in individuals with the inherited metabolic disorder phenylketonuria (PKU) have often been associated with metabolic control and its history. For the present study executive functioning (EF) was assessed in 21 PKU patients during childhood (T1, mean age 10.4 years, SD = 2.0) and again in adulthood (T2, mean age...
Background:
Empathy deficits are hypothesized to underlie impairments in social interaction exhibited by those who engage in antisocial behaviour. Social attention is an essential precursor to empathy; however, no studies have yet examined social attention in relation to cognitive and affective empathy in those exhibiting antisocial behaviour.
Me...
Objective:
Despite early dietary treatment phenylketonuria patients have lower IQ and poorer executive functions compared to healthy controls. Cognitive problems in phenylketonuria have often been associated with phenylalanine levels. The present study examined the cognitive profile and mental health in adult phenylketonuria, in relation to phenyl...
Children with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS; velo-cardio-facial-syndrome) are at risk for the developmental disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this study, the relation between executive functioning (EF) and the severity of ADHD and ASD symptoms is examined, since EF is known to be...
This paper examines how COMT(158) genotypes and plasma proline levels are associated with variable penetrance of social behavioural and social-cognitive problems in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS). Severity of autistic spectrum symptoms of 45 participants with 22q11DS was assessed using the Autism Diagnostic Interview Revised. Face and facial e...
Objective:
Early treatment of phenylketonuria (ET-PKU) prevents mental retardation, but many patients still show cognitive and mood problems. In this study, it was investigated whether ET-PKU-patients have specific phenylalanine (Phe-)related problems with respect to social-cognitive functioning and social skills.
Methods:
Ninety five PKU-patien...
Inhibitory control (IC) and negative emotionality (NE) are both linked to aggressive behavior, but their interplay has not yet been clarified. This study examines different NE × IC interaction models in relation to aggressive behavior in 855 preschoolers (aged 2-5 years) using parental questionnaires. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that...
Background and aims:
Besides motor function the cerebellum subserves frontal lobe functions. Thus, we investigated executive functions in pediatric posterior fossa tumor survivors.
Methods:
We tested information processing, aspects of attention, planning and intelligence in 42 pediatric posterior fossa tumor survivors (mean age 14.63 yrs, SD 5.0...
Cognitive impairment is very common in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is strongly associated with increased mortality. This review article will discuss the pathophysiology of cognitive impairment in CKD, as well as the effect of dialysis and transplantation on cognitive function. In CKD, uremic toxins, hyperparathyroidism and Klotho deficiency le...
The first cohorts to survive childhood lymphoid malignancies treated with cranial irradiation are now aging into adulthood, and concerns are growing about the development of radiotherapy-induced cognitive deficits in the aging brain. These deficits are hypothesized to increase over time. Their impact on daily functioning of older survivors, and the...
Background: Patients with schizophrenia show impairments in social information processing, such as recognising facial emotions and face identity.
Goal: The aim of this study was to explore whether these impairments represent specific deficits or are part of a more general cognitive dysfunction.
Method: Forty-two patients with schizophrenia and 42 m...
Background
The 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS; velo-cardio-facial syndrome) is associated with an increased risk of various disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). With this study, we aimed to investigate the relation between intellectual functioning and severity of ASD and ADHD s...
Patients with schizophrenia show impairments in social cognitive abilities, such as recognizing facial emotions. However, the relation to symptoms remains unclear. The goal of this study was to explore whether facial emotion recognition and face identity recognition are associated with severity of symptoms and to which extent associations with symp...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with early disturbances in brain maturation processes and these interferences presumably have their consequences for the progressive emergence of cognitive deficits later in life, as expressed in intelligence profiles. In this study, we addressed the impact of age on cognitive functioning of 6- to 15-y...
How school-associated behavioral problems in childhood and adolescence precede distinctive adult schizotypal symptoms was examined. Gender specific findings were explored. After 11.6 (SD = 3.1) years, 159 patients of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands were reassessed for adult...
Background: Medication nonadherence in patients with schizophrenia presents a serious clinical problem. Research on interventions incorporating
motivational interviewing (MI) to improve adherence have shown mixed results. Aims: Primary aim is to determine the effectiveness of a MI intervention on adherence and hospitalization rates in patients, wit...
CNS-directed chemotherapy (CT) and cranial radiotherapy (CRT) for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia or lymphoma have various neurotoxic properties. This study aimed to assess their impact on the maturing brain 20 to 30 years after diagnosis, providing a much stronger perspective on long-term quality of life than previous studies.
Ninety-three...
Autism is a highly heritable and clinically heterogeneous neuropsychiatric disorder that frequently co-occurs with other psychopathologies, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). An approach to parse heterogeneity is by forming more homogeneous subgroups of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) patients based on their underlying, heritab...
Eveningness, the preference of being active during the evening in contrast to the morning, has been associated with markedly increased problem behavior in adolescents; however, the underlying mechanisms are still not understood. This study investigates the association of eveningness with behavior and cognition in children aged 7-12 yrs, and explore...
It was examined how juvenile psychiatric disorders and adult schizotypal symptoms are associated. 731 patients of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands, with mean age of 12.1 years (SD = 4.0) were reassessed at the mean age of 27.9 years (SD = 5.7) for adult schizotypal symptoms...
Cognitive research proposes that social cognition (SC), executive functions (EF) and local processing style (weak CC) may be fruitful areas for research into the familial-genetic underpinnings of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The performance of 140 children with ASD, 172 siblings and 127 controls on tasks measuring SC (face recognition, affectiv...
In this study, we addressed the relation between specific deficits in cognitive control and schizotypal symptomatology in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) diagnosed in childhood. We aimed to identify cognitive control deficits as markers of vulnerability to the development of schizophrenia spectrum pathology in ASD. Symptoms of auti...
Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) frequently co-occur. Given the heterogeneity of both disorders, several more homogeneous ASD-ADHD comorbidity subgroups may exist. The current study examined whether such subgroups exist, and whether their overlap or distinctiveness in associated comorbid symptoms a...
A proportion of children within the autism spectrum is at risk for severe deregulation of thought, emotion and behaviour resulting in (symptoms of) psychotic disorders over the course of development. In an attempt to identify this subgroup, children with PDD-NOS, subtype MCDD (n = 24) were compared to children with PDD-NOS (n = 23) on executive fun...
Abstract Background Prophylaxis to prevent relapses in the central nervous system after childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) used to consist of both intrathecal chemotherapy (CT) and cranial irradiation (CRT). CRT was mostly abolished in the eighties because of its neurotoxicity, and replaced with more intensive intrathecal CT. In this stud...
Understanding people begins with the understanding of the infant-directed actions of the primary caretaker. The infant is cuddled and handled, thus acquiring an affective experience of its mother’s body. We asked the mothers of a hundred 2.5- to 5.5-month-old infants whether infants reacted in an understandable way to the mother’s gestures and when...
This study examines the association between neurocognitive functioning and tobacco smoking in adolescence.
Data from three measurements of the longitudinal Tracking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS), a large regional population-based cohort study of Dutch adolescents, were used. The first measurement took place in 2001-2002 (T1) when pa...
Unlabelled:
This study examines short-term memory, verbal working memory, episodic long-term memory, and intelligence in 32 children with mild neonatal encephalopathy (NE), 39 children with moderate NE, 10 children with NE who developed cerebral palsy (CP), and 53 comparison children, at the age of 9 to 10 years.
Results:
in addition to a global...
Understanding people begins with the understanding of the infant-directed actions by the primary caretaker. The infant is cuddled and handled, thus acquiring an affective experi-ence of its mothers’ body in a dyadic interaction.
Personal interviews with the mothers of 100 2.5-to 5.5-month-old infants answered the question whether these infants rea...
Understanding how the brain integrates features from different domains that are processed in distinct cortical regions calls for the examination of integration processes. Recent studies of feature-repetition effects demonstrated interactions across perceptual features and action-related features: repeating only some features of the perception-actio...
The peak in age of onset of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia during puberty and early adulthood suggests a relationship between the expression of psychopathology and the changes in the brain and body that take place during this dynamic maturational period, including a dramatic increase in circulating oestrogens and androgens. This study ex...
The behavioral characterization of animals that carry genetic disorder abnormalities in a controlled genetic and environmental background may be used to identify human deficits that are significant to understand underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Here, we studied whether previously reported object recognition impairments in mice with a supernum...
Nonadherence to antipsychotic medication is highly prevalent in patients with schizophrenia and has a deleterious impact on the course of the illness. This review seeks to determine the interventions that were examined in the past decade to improve adherence rates.
The literature between 2000 and 2009 was searched for randomized controlled trials w...
Sixty-four children, aged 7 to 14 years, with early-treated PKU, were compared with control children on visual evoked potential (VEP) amplitudes and latencies and auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes. It was further investigated whether indices of dietary control would be associated with these evoked potentials parameters. There were no si...
By studying behavior, cognitive abilities and brain functioning in adolescents at high risk for psychosis, we can gain an insight into the vulnerability markers or protective factors in the development of psychotic symptoms. Although many high-risk studies have focused on impairments in neurocognitive functions, such as memory and attention, very f...
Stressful life events can result into declined memory performance at later age. One hypothesis suggests that stress affects the hippocampus, a brain area important for memory functioning. This study explored a potential relationship between the number of negative stressful life events and hippocampus-dependent declarative but not hippocampus-indepe...
The main debate in the treatment of Phenylketonuria (PKU) is whether adult patients need the strict phenylalanine (Phe)-restricted diet. Physicians and patients lack evidence-based guidelines to help them make well-informed choices. We have carried out the first randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial into the effects of short-term elevati...
This study focused on important characteristics of attentional (selective) processing in children with early-treated phenylketonuria (PKU). Seven to 14-year-old children with PKU were allocated to high phenylalanine (Phe) and low Phe groups and compared with control children on amplitudes and latencies of early and late event-related potential (ERP...
Despite early and continuous dietary intervention, individuals with early-treated phenylketonuria (PKU) experience significant neurocognitive sequelae. An area of cognitive ability that is believed to be particularly affected is executive function (EF). This paper provides a critical review of the evidence for EF impairment in early-treated PKU wit...
Thirty NF1-patients (mean age 11.7 years, SD = 3.3) and 30 healthy controls (mean age 12.5 years, SD = 3.1) were assessed on social skills, autistic traits, hyperactivity-inattention, emotional problems, conduct problems, and peer problems. Cognitive control, information processing speed, and social information processing were measured using 5 comp...